Ideal PunBB for Academic Use

I've already addressed some of these issues elsewhere, but I wanted to group together the limitations that PunBB has for my current use of it in an academic setting:

1. UTF-8 Should be default for all languages, including English. This is true of other apps such as MediaWiki and Wordpress.

2. RSS feeds should be available for private forums. One option might be to publish RSS feeds to a sub-directory which can then be protected with .htaccess.

3. Not everyone uses RSS, so there should be the option of having all members of a group receive an e-mail whenever the forums to which they have access are updated with a new topic. THey should not receive new notifications of additional posts in those topics unless they are subscribed however. This is how I had PHPBB setup. Oh, and "subscribe to this" should be on by default for anyone who writes a post or replies to one. However, that should be something one can set in the preferences.

4. There should be the ability to batch add a list of e-mail addresses, generating usernames, setting langauge setting, providing a random passoword for each, and also assigning them all to a group (or more than one) at the same time.

5. There should also be the ability to batch modify users found via searches, adding all checked users to a group at the same time.

6. THere should be support for "sticky" topics that always appear at the top.

I'm sure some of this can be done via Mods, but for academic settings it is a pain to have to update mods each semester to meet security patches, etc.

Anyone else have thoughts about what their ideal Academic build of PunBB might look like?